There’s a less cynical take:

We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.

Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.

What nobody understands is people will move on to bigger and badder hobbies, like 100 years ago your hobbies might have been playing cards or maybe woodworking. 100 years from now your hobby won’t be debugging Python exceptions, it will be working on a fusion reactor in a friend’s garage over a couple beers.

That's fair, I meant it in a more loving way than it came across. One of the great things about human culture is that we're happy to form impromptu hierarchies like that. You even have friend groups where people are happy to win an n=1 status game by being "the jeans guy", and everyone happily tells them how cool it is that they're so into selvedge denim.